Weekend tech reading: MIT's shoulder-mounted robot arms, 60+ GPUs tested on Linux

Matthew DeCarlo

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Here's that extra pair of robot arms you've always wanted Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (SRLs) are robotic limbs that, when worn, give you more limbs than you'd normally have. In other words, they're not robotic limbs designed to replace biological limbs that you might be missing, but rather robotic limbs designed to augment the number of limbs that you have already. MIT researchers have been developing SRLs that can help you do stuff that would be annoying, uncomfortable, or impossible to do on your own. IEEE Spectrum

New supercapacitor technology could store, conduct power on the same copper wires One of the fundamental challenges of battery technology is that lithium-ion batteries -- by far the best general option for energy storage currently in wide commercial use -- are intrinsically bulky and heavy. A new research team at the University of Central Florida believes they can challenge that problem by turning copper wires into supercapacitors, then embedding those wires into the fabric of your clothing or the body of a device. ExtremeTech

EFF tells court that the NSA knowingly and illegally destroyed evidence in key case over bulk surveillance We followed the back and forth situation earlier this year, in which there were some legal questions over whether or not the NSA needed to hang onto surveillance data at issue in various lawsuits, or destroy it as per the laws concerning retention of data. Unfortunately, in the process, it became clear that the DOJ misled FISA court Judge Reggie Walton, withholding key information. Techdirt

Wikipedia mining algorithm reveals the most influential people in 35 centuries of human history Whatever your interest in history, most of what you have learned will be strongly influenced by your language and your cultural background. The historical figures who feature strongly in Chinese schools will differ dramatically from those that feature in US schools, or Indian schools or Russian ones. This kind of bias is also reflected in the various language editions of Wikipedia. Medium

Testing 60+ Intel/AMD/Nvidia GPUs on Linux with open-source drivers With Thursday marking the ten year anniversary of launching Phoronix.com and also the six-year anniversary since the public 1.0 debut of the Phoronix Test Suite, there's a lot of interesting articles that I've been working on to celebrate these two milestones. For your viewing pleasure today is easily the largest graphics processor comparison that's ever happened at Phoronix... Phoronix

World of Darkness - The inside story on the death of a game For the video game industry, Monday 14 April 2014 was just another day of layoffs and wasted creative energy. The massively multiplayer online game World of Darkness had spent nine years in development but was being cancelled, and its production studio CCP Atlanta slashed to a sliver of its former size. Fifty-six people lost their jobs. Insiders could barely muster a collective shrug. The Guardian

A fast look at Swift, Apple's new programming language If anyone outside Apple saw Swift coming, they certainly weren't making any public predictions. In the middle of a keynote filled with the sorts of announcements you'd expect (even if the details were a surprise), Apple this week announced that it has created a modern replacement for the Objective-C, a programming language the company has used since shortly after Steve Jobs founded NeXT. Ars Technica

Arcadia, a love story For a guy who has spent six months and more than $32,000 turning the bedroom of his Manhattan apartment into an old-school video arcade, Chris Kooluris is very put together. He greets me at his Murray Hill flat dressed head to toe in designer casual wear-- Ralph Lauren jeans, pristine white Y-3 Yohji Yamamoto sneakers, and a crisp Captain America T-shirt. He’s trim and athletic-looking, his shaven face boyish for a 37-year-old. Wired

Smartphone audio testing - HTC One M8 and Samsung Galaxy S5 Since our initial turn in testing smartphone audio, I’ve had a lot more time to play with the APx582 from Audio Precision. I’ve also received far more feedback than I ever expected to on this subject. I have made a few changes to the testing method that I’m going to outline along with discussing some of the reasoning behind the changes. AnandTech

Should you have a right to sell your ebooks and digital music? People can be surprised to discover that they don’t actually own the digital books and songs they buy, but that they instead rent them from large companies like Amazon and Apple. In response, Congress is asking whether copyright law should be changed to ensure people can resell or lend out their digital goods. Gigaom

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That's fantastic, now I can scratch my rear whilst carry the shopping home from the store.
 
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